


Backpack Whispers

by Gdboone



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Gen, Horror, Occult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:56:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gdboone/pseuds/Gdboone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some curiosities are better left alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backpack Whispers

~~~~Backpack Whispers

By:  G.D. Boone

 

     It was only 7:45 as Ron had stepped from the bus and then raced across the street to slip into the Miskatonic Deli – the scrolling marquee in the window advertising teriyaki lunch specials and cigarettes for $4.85 a pack.  After the crisp jingling of the bells at the door drew the attentions of the cashier away from her studying, Ron strode into the deli and caught a good look at the text book open on the counter.

     “You know Gwen…trying to cram at the last minute for Professor Meyer’s tests isn’t going to help.  Trust me, when I took his Comparative Religions Class I found out that if you didn’t know the information the night before…well, you may as well try dropping off a bottle of bourbon at his office before the test.”

     “I know.  But you think he’d cut me a little slack since I’ve been grading all of his undergraduate papers for him this term.”  She shrugged wearily and pushed the text book aside.  “…I wonder if the liquor store is open yet…”

     Out of habit, he reached in to squeeze the box of Parliaments in his coat pocket – and finding it empty, he grabbed a newspaper and then strolled up to the register to get a fresh pack of his “coffin nails”.  After swiping his debit card and shoving the paper in his backpack, he stepped outside and immediately fired up a cigarette – reveling in the “first smoke of the day” tingle that raced through him.  Cracking the door of the store open, he peeked inside to catch Gwen picking up the text book again.

     “Liquor store opens at 9:00…his favorite is Black Oak Antique.  Get him anything older than a 10 year and you’ll have a free pass on the test.”

     It was cold as he slipped in and out of the morning shadows of the buildings on his way up the street toward the university campus – the twinkle of frost still reflecting from pavement that hadn’t yet been touched by the warmth of the sun.  Standing at the street corner waiting for the lights to change he glanced at his watch and realized that he wasn’t due at the office for a little over an hour.  Taking a final drag off his smoke before dropping it to the sidewalk, he decided to put off dealing with his co-workers with a leisurely stroll through Arkham. 

     With the Christmas decorations recently put up in the store windows, he’d decided to go grab a cup of tea and enjoy the sights of the holidays before the shoppers and tourists descended on downtown to add further congestion to the streets and sidewalks.  This was only one time of the year that he really didn’t mind working for the university – most of the time the crowds, noise and chaotic pace of people tearing through the campus were anything but charming.  However, from Thanksgiving through the end of the year there was something in the air that had an almost magical feeling to it.  People seemed more pleasant and the drab storefronts and gray buildings on campus seemed to take on a warmth and vibrancy that they lacked during the rest of the year.

       He’d managed to keep his rose colored glasses on for all of two blocks before he’d been shouldered aside by a large angry woman who’d substituted a string of obscenities for “Happy Holidays” as a greeting and been assaulted by the traditional holiday smells of the city...urine wafting from an alley, over-full dumpsters filled with rotting produce and the punch of low tide as it drifted up the Miskatonic River – pushed by the chill winds from the sea.

     Grumbling as his Hollywood version of Christmas in Arkham collapsed around him in a cloud of bus exhaust, a man came dashing out of an alley he was passing and collided with him – spinning him around as the two momentarily became entangled.  There was a brief struggle, and as Ron tried to push the kicking and screaming street person off him the man had thrust a dingy backpack into Ron’s hands before stumbling backwards.

     “I didn’t know…Oh God…I didn’t know…I won’t let them take me!  Can’t you hear them…?!!”

     With that, the man pushed back from Ron, turned and charged into the street with a desperate shriek.  It had all happened so quickly that Ron didn’t have time to look away from the sound of screeching tires and dull wet crunch as a garbage truck smashed into the man.  Now, unable to move, he stood on the sidewalk clutching the dead man’s backpack…his fingers toying absently with its worn straps as he watched blood pool about the twitching remains on the street.  As he heard the approach of sirens in the distance, he dragged his cell phone out of his pocket and called his office – the whole scene unfolding in front of him becoming reminiscent one of the many crime dramas flooding the airwaves lately. 

     “I’m going to be late…”

     The police had shown up – along with a television crew looking for the next sensational story to scare the hell out of the town - and had shut down the street while they investigated the scene.  No one had asked him any questions – as they’d always done on TV - and the two times that Ron had stepped forward in an attempt to speak with one of the officers, he’d been told to step back behind the tape as they were “investigating the scene”.  When he’d overheard a comment about “cleaning up the crazy homeless guy mess” from one of the officers, he simply gave up and walked away from the accident feeling fairly certain that getting to work early would be preferable to watching now what would only be on the five o’clock news later. 

     It wasn’t until much later, while he was sitting at his desk staring at his computer screen that he even remembered the backpack the terrified man had forced on him.  Shifting slightly in his chair, he looked down on the floor next to his own leather bag, to consider the red filthy pack laying there.  Nudging the bag with his foot while taking a look at the outside of the bag, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary…the red nylon of the bag was stained with dark blotches, had a strong “fishy” odor to it and was torn in many places with most of the zippers on the pouches broken or simply gone.  After five minutes of staring at the bag as it lay on the floor next to his desk, he had finally decided he should open it up and take a look inside when he noticed his supervisor wandering up to his cube.

     “Davis…I understand you saw that whole accident this morning with the bum playing chicken with the bus…?”

     Prying his eyes away from the red backpack, he looked up to Eric and gave a slow nod – unsure of how to really respond to such a soulless comment without getting fired.  Deciding that today was not the day to educate his boss on the finer points of how not to be mistaken for a Nazi; he merely cleared this throat and smiled weakly.

     “It was a garbage truck Eric…”

     “Really?  Huh.  Well, HR sent me down here to make sure you were ok, and to offer to let you go home if you needed to.  Apparently seeing a homeless person get pasted by a garbage truck is considered traumatic enough to warrant the use of sick time…You just let me know.”

     Given his state of mind, he had packed his stuff up right then and taken the offer to head home – having been too distracted most of the morning to really get anything done with the images of the accident haunting him.  One image in particular simply refused to be sponged from his mind’s eye; the sight of the dying man coughing up gouts of blood as he fought for his last breaths would simply not leave him. 

     As he walked down the street from his office on campus, the man’s face continued to haunt him - he hadn’t appeared to him to be insane in the moments before he bolted into traffic - terrified for certain, but not crazy.  The more he thought on the incident - the more he replayed it over and over in his mind - the more he came to think that the man from the alley may have been running for his life – not preparing to end it by throwing himself into the flow of the oncoming traffic.

     His inability to shake free of the incidents of this morning had then started a careful examination of what had happened outside that alley this morning – starting with the apparent mental state of the homeless man who’d run into him all the way through his acquisition of this backpack he now carried.  Frustrated with the questions surrounding the accident, he then started to explore the outer pouches of the red backpack - searching for his own answers to the encounter this morning while continuing on his way down the street. 

     Initially he was finding bits of paper, food wrappers and finally an expired coupon for a free bagel in the many side pockets of the bag.  After fussing with the zipper to the main pouch of the bag, it tore free rather than unzip to reveal the contents of the red backpack.  Parting the torn fabric, he looked inside to find a square object wrapped in canvas.  Carefully removing it from the red backpack, and finding nothing else in the main compartment, he ducked into an alley he was passing by and tossed the red backpack into an unlocked dumpster. 

     Glad to be free of the filthy backpack, and any awkward questions anyone may have had about it, he tucked the canvas bundle carefully into his own bag and turned back to the street.  He’d only taken a couple of steps down the dank alley when he heard what he thought was a wet croaking of whispered words in the alley behind him.  Turning slowly, he looked down the length of the alley as the echoes of this noise faded into the lengthening shadow…only to see a few dumpsters crowded together against the building walls.  Unable to see anyone lurking about, he hurried out of the alley and back into the street – the hairs beginning to bristle on the back of his neck.

     Foot traffic was fairly light for this time of the evening as he walked along the street which ran parallel to the university.  With every step, he could feel the additional weight of this unknown item in his backpack and hear it as it rattled and bumped against his laptop – both piquing his curiosity and heightening a sense of foreboding which had initially settled over him in the alley. 

     Amongst all of the homeless man’s other possessions, whatever this was had been treated with no small amount of care and consideration…there was something special about what he now carried with him.  After consulting the bus schedule, he decided he had time for both a cup of tea and a quick examination of the canvas bundle.  Crossing the street, with a friendly wave to an oncoming driver who’d slowed down to let him cross the street, he walked into what most agreed was the best coffee house in Arkham – the smells of fresh coffee and spiced tea greeting him as he opened the door    

     Mad Katt Espresso, across the street from the campus, was fairly quiet as he entered – the hiss of the espresso machine as milk was steamed and some quiet conversations were the only noises to interrupt a recording of Ella Fitzgerald that drifted in the background.  After placing his order, and dropping a couple of dollars into the tip jar next to the register, he settled into a corner booth with his cup of green tea - glancing over at an elder gentleman at the next table to return the man’s offered smile with a nod. 

     Perhaps wanting to prolong the mystery and excitement a bit longer, he had placed the bundle on the table before him and simply stared at it as he sipped his tea.  It was the same size as his lap top, had a hard covering and appeared to be open on three sides giving a clear indication, at last to him, that what lay before him was a large ornate book of some type.  He couldn’t imagine why a homeless person would lug something as impractical as a hardbound book of this size around with him…other than the possibility of it being worth something – or stolen from the university. 

     Setting his tea down, he reached out and gently tugged at the canvas – finding the edges of the fabric before pulling it away from the object.  After he had finished removing the canvas, he found himself looking at a large black book – the leather cover giving the impression that it glistened with a thin oily sheen.  Licking his lips nervously, he reached down and trailed a finger along the ridge of one of the many bizarre designs decorating the cover and spine of the book – a slight shiver running up his spine as he had the sudden impression he was touching something that had washed up dead on a beach.  None of the symbols on the book were familiar to him – most were odd geometric designs or tribal images of sea creatures and underwater vistas.  Without a title evident anywhere on the book, he hooked a finger under the cover and eased it open.

     If the symbols on the cover of the book had seemed odd to him, the contents of the book were even more so.  He guessed that a majority of the language was Latin, but in places throughout the book, there were large passages written in a language he couldn’t even begin to guess at.  Resting his chin in his palm, he began mouthing through some of the odd words…the sounds making little sense as they left his lips…

     “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.  Ia-Ia Dagon scha naerg fwagli visch M’leahn”

     For a moment, his eyes lost focus on the page and his temples began to throb.  Pushing back from the table, he shook his head a couple of times before rubbing his eyes…a feeling of vertigo slowly building around him.  Once his vision had begun to clear and his headache had subsided to a dull throbbing, he re-wrapped the book and put it in his backpack.  Somewhere in the back of his mind a general sense of unease was taking root and worming its way towards his stomach.  Caught in a sudden wave of nausea, he pushed himself from the booth, and bolted for the men’s room - his hand blocking the vomit which now surged into his mouth.  Dropping to his knees in front of the toilet, he emptied his stomach into the basin before collapsing on the bathroom floor.

     With a ribbon of vomit leaking from his mouth, he lay there a moment …unable to move even with the pungent reek of the toilet so close to him.  Finally feeling that he would be able to roll over, he pushed himself up to his knees where he again threw up as an odd smell of dead fish suddenly washed over him.  Holding his breath, he began pulling himself across the linoleum floor toward the still open door of the men’s room – crying out when he felt someone take a hold of his arms.  The elderly man from the table next to him was leaning over him…his mouth moving, but the sound of his words were being drown out by a loud roaring in his ears. 

     Blinking several times, he waved off the old man and propped himself up in a sitting position where he turned to see several people standing outside the bathroom door staring in at him.  Reaching up to the sink, he hoisted himself from the cool bathroom floor with the assistance of the old man who he was now able to hear – the throbbing in his temples and the roar in his ears subsiding a bit.

     “You should take it easy there.  Have you ever had a seizure before?  My goodness I saw you jump up from your seat and then race in here…certainly made quite a commotion …maybe you should just sit down for a bit until the ambulance gets here…”

     “That won’t be necessary.  Really, I probably just ate something that didn’t agree with me this morning.  I appreciate the concern, but there’s no reason for an ambulance…I’m feeling much better really, and I’m going to miss my bus if I don’t get going.”

     Letting go of the support that the bathroom sink had been providing, he shuffled back out into the coffee shop then crossed the black and white checkered linoleum to his table - the pressure in his temples still thrumming painfully.  Using the table for support, he reached over to grab his backpack from the booth where he’d left it – aware of the many eyes on him as he was making ready to leave.  After latching the main compartment closed and popping a couple of mints in his mouth to mask the taste of vomit lingering there, he hoisted the backpack on his shoulder and turned to leave.  He’d made a quick stop by the condiment bar to drop off his tea and grab a napkin to dab at the cold sweat on his forehead when he heard someone behind him muttering.

     "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn."

Spinning around, the old man from the table next to him, was staring intently at him from where he’d just returned to his seat.

     “What did you say?” Ron stammered.

     As Ron stared at the old man, he was certain that he saw the folds of skin on his neck ripple.  Setting his coffee down the old man looked back up at Ron and smiled darkly.

     “I said that you should really wait until the ambulance gets here to check you out.” 

     Taking a couple of steps backwards, he collided with a chair behind him causing it to tip over with a loud clatter.  As he clumsily righted the chair, he thought he heard those words again – whispered from somewhere nearby.  Panic threatened to send him scrambling back into the bathroom with the growing chorus of whispering – the voices were croaking all about him, yet apparently unheard by the other patrons of the café.  With the whispering now seeming to come from all around him, he spun on the others…

     “Who’s saying that?!  Who’s whispering those goddamn words…?” With a breathless rasp, he stumbled back a step -his eyes darting about the room.  “Stop it!!”

     The impression of something cold and wet settled on his shoulder…causing him to spin around with a shriek.  A young kid stood in front of him with his hands held out – his eyes wide and expression full of fear.  Gasping for breath between his high-pitched shrieks, he shook himself free of the kid who was now staring hungrily at him and pushed himself backwards towards the door.  The disembodied voices continued to assault him repeating the same phrase over and over - "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn."  Finally, feeling the glass of the door to the coffee shop press up against his back, he turned, wrenched the door open and fled down the street.

     The voices were everywhere now…coming from underneath passing cars, whispering down from building rooftops, gurgling from sewer grates - everywhere he turned to flee, the chorus followed him as he ran screaming down the street.  He could see it in the eyes of everyone he passed - they were all part of it…they knew where the voices were coming from and they knew what voices wanted.  As he continued to run down the street screaming and knocking those in his path out of the way, the chanting had grown in volume and tempo – a torrent of noise in which he thought he’d surly drown.

     Hands then latched onto him, pulling him to the ground where he frantically struggled to free himself from what ever had attacked him – his shrieks rising in pitch as he found himself pinned to the ground underneath some great greasy bulk.  The sickening odor of decaying fish was everywhere as he thrashed about and screamed underneath the slippery weight of the creature holding him down – its breath washing over the back of his neck as he lay there struggling.  Suddenly, a human voice wove its way into the guttural croaks and chanting surrounding him…a level, calming bass voice reaching out to him in the maelstrom of the chant.  Finally managing to squirm from underneath the creature who’d taken him down, he crawled across the sidewalk to huddle wide eyed against a nearby building – his labored breathing punctuated with discordant shrieks of terror.  The human voice was still there, and now had finally punched through the endless chanting that echoed all about him.

     “Easy buddy…you’re ok.  We got some people coming to help you out…Now what’s going on?”

     Peering from around his backpack which was held before him like a shield, Ron could make out a cop kneeling before him where he thought the creature should be – one hand hovering over his gun, the other extended to him.  Uttering a shriek choked with bouts of sobbing, he began rocking back and forth on the sidewalk - reaching up to claw at his ears - which were now bloody and torn from his attempts to silence the voices.  

     “Oh…gawd…they…they’re every where.  You can hear them can’t you…they’re calling to me.  You’ve got to help me please…I can’t get away from the voices…”

     “Ia-Ia Dagon scha naerg fwagli visch M’leahn”

     Eyes wide, Ron stared at the police officer who was now glaring at him with a hungry snarl. 

     “What did you say…?”

     Lurching to his feet, Ron watched the officer back away and draw his weapon as the skin on the man’s forehead began to sag – peeling away from the skull to hint at the horror lurking beneath.  Backing up against the building to scream and claw madly at the stone at this back, Ron watched as the officer’s face fell to the pavement with a wet splat…revealing the green, blotched skin and large black eyes that had been hidden beneath the human facade.  Its lips moved and a single voice rose above the croaking chorus.

     “Ia-Ia Dagon scha naerg fwagli visch M’leahn.  Phwa’naeg Cthulhu f’thagoen.”

With a wild shriek, Ron flung himself at the creature – arms reaching for its throat.

     “You!!  You won’t take me…I’ll kill you!!!”

**…**

     It had only taken the other units five minutes to respond to the initial call from the coffee shop – then reports started filtering in about a crazy man attacking people on the streets near campus.  When they had gotten there, they found the first officer on the scene bent over throwing up in the gutter and a gunshot victim splayed on the sidewalk.  From all accounts of the by-standers, the officer had attempted to calm down the man, and had then been forced to shoot the man in self defense when he’d been attacked – emptying a full clip into the man’s chest before he had collapsed to his knees…blood choked screams still being forced from his bullet ridden chest.

     The officer was now leaning against a parked car looking at the dead body and shaking his head slowly - trying repeatedly to clear the taste of vomit from his mouth by spitting into the street.  After helping tape off the area of the incident, another of Arkham’s finest walked up and patted the young officer on his shoulder while looking over at the corpse.

     “Tony…you didn’t have a choice man.  Everyone who saw what happened has said the same thing - he was going to kill you if you hadn’t acted.”

     Tony could only shrug in response.  He’d only been on the force for a year, and had never had to draw his weapon – much less discharge it in the line of duty.  He could still remember approaching the dying man shouting for him to remain on the ground, kicking his backpack out of reach then patting him down for weapons.  The guy seemed terrified of Tony, and had spent the last seconds of his life attempting to claw his way across the icy sidewalk to get away from him – a sight he was sure he’d have to live with for the rest of his life. 

     He’d be asked to recount the incident by his superiors later, and also knew he’d be placed on administrative leave while the shooting was investigated, so he continued to replay the events in his mind to ensure every detail was committed to memory.  When he’d backed away from the corpse, his foot had hit the man’s backpack causing it to spill open on the sidewalk.  Scattered on the sidewalk he’d then found the man’s wallet - which had identified him as Ron Davis - business cards, a laptop computer, a set of house keys and a large leather book – partially wrapped in canvas.  He distinctly remembered the book because of its oily, slick feeling as he’d picked it up to look for any other identifying evidence – a feeling he was still trying to clean from his hands.

     While continuing to wipe his hands on his pants, he looked up to see an unmarked car pull up and Sheriff Hearne get out to head towards the scene.  Pushing away from the car, he started walking towards the sheriff when he heard something muttered behind him.

     “Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn”

     Turning around to the other cop who’d just been talking to him a moment before, Tony narrowed his eyes.

     “What did you say…?”

    


End file.
